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It’s part of human nature to test our limits. But what happens when this part comes to define us? When Jenny Valentish wrote a memoir about addiction, she noticed that people who treated drug-taking like an Olympic sport would often hurl themselves into a pursuit such as marathon running upon getting sober. What stayed constant was the need to push their boundaries. Everything Harder Than Everyone Else follows people doing the things that most couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. Their insights lead Jenny on a compulsive, sometimes reckless journey through psychology, endurance and the power of obsession, revealing what we can learn about the human condition. There’s the neuroscientist...
'Nina Dall is as singular and mercurial a character as I've ever been charmed and terrified to meet.' TIM ROGERS Nina Dall has seen it all by her twenty-first birthday, including her own meteoric rise to fame and its inevitable aftermath. She created teen band The Dolls to escape suburban hell. Now she needs to prove she's not a one-hit wonder and convince veteran producer John Villiers to be her own personal svengali. But he's got his own problems. Rose Dall craves adoration, and through The Dolls, she gets it. But with the band's every move coming under media scrutiny and cousin Nina going off the rails, she's pushed to breaking point. Can The Dolls survive each other? Alannah Dall had a pop career in the 1980s before disappearing from public view. She's resurfaced to steer her nieces away from the same scandals, but with her own comeback on the cards, The Dolls start to become a threat. A mesmerising ride into the heart of love, fame and rock'n'roll. You have to risk everything to get to the top-and even more to stay there. But how do you get back what's been lost along the way? Cherry Bomb is a brilliant debut novel that will grab you tight and never let you go.
Whether it's cartwheeling naked across a rugby field in front of an audience of one billion (including your dad); playing eleven-minute soft rock tracks on night-shift radio as cover for some adult magazine fumblings; getting your appendix removed to avoid an English lesson; or stealing KISS's groupies and charging the champagne to Gene Simmons'...
In 1981, fifteen-year-old Nikki McWatters is living in a Gold Coast suburb, dragging herself through humdrum schooldays and dreaming of losing her virginity to a rock star. With three friends she starts the Vulture Club for aspiring groupies – and so begins a festival of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. As Nikki gets older, her conquests get bigger and the stakes get higher. From Australian Crawl to INXS, Pseudo Echo to Duran Duran, she is living her teenage dream – but is the groupie life all it’s cracked up to be? One Way or Another is an irresistible romp through a world of pub rock, big hair, wild nights and mornings after. With irrepressible humour and a bulging little black book...
Award-winning journalist Gary Nunn investigates psychics, mediums and astrologers to understand their uncanny power – and whether it's used for good or evil. Gary has always been a sceptic. His sister Taren, an avid believer, consults mediums to navigate a family trauma. When Gary reports a news story about a clairvoyant's link to the collapse of a huge stockbroking firm, personal questions become professional. Why do such large swathes of the population want their fortunes told? Why this need to believe? What is he missing? So begins a two-year investigation into the mysterious, unregulated world of psychics. Gary tries some out himself, sometimes with hilarious results. He hears about th...
In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humour and brutal honesty. When Vicki and her sister learn their mother has been hospitalized for a broken hip, they return to their parents' home in Alberta to put things back in order. Though their parents disowned them years before, the sisters now reassert themselves in the dysfunctional household: their father, undernourished and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, is unable to see that he is in danger from his outlandish and vindictive wife. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they...
David Walsh - the creator of Mona in Hobart - is both a giant and an enigma in the Australian art world. A multi-millionaire who made his money gambling, David has turned a wild vision into a unique reality; he is in turns controversial, mysterious and idolised. A Bone of Fact is his utterly unconventional and absorbing memoir, about which he says:'By some great good fortune (mine, not yours) you hold in your hands my story, credible I think, but not extraordinary (despite what those avaricious publishers might have you believe). I have captured your attention: maybe you have some resonance with Mona, or maybe good graphical design partly seized your day. To extract 55 bucks from you I need ...
WINNER OF THE 2022 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S PRIZE FOR LITERATURE WINNER OF THE 2022 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR INDIGENOUS WRITING SHORTLISTED FOR THE DOUGLAS STEWART PRIZE FOR NONFICTION The story of an Aboriginal woman who worked as a police officer and fought for justice both within and beyond the Australian police force. A proud Gunai/Kurnai woman, Veronica Gorrie grew up dauntless, full of cheek and a fierce sense of justice. After watching her friends and family suffer under a deeply compromised law-enforcement system, Gorrie signed up for training to become one of a rare few Aboriginal police officers in Australia. In her ten years in the force, she witnessed appalling instituti...
Luke Williams flies to Kuala Lumpur coming down off crystal meth without plans or much cash. He is in Asia for three years. He spends time working as a prostitute in Pattaya, eats snake heart in Vietnam, consults an American medium in Ubud, and explores the eye-popping red light scenes in Jakarta and the Philippines. Along the way, he encounters other Westerners who go to Asia for the things they can't find at home - riches, wives, ladyboys, cheap living and even cheaper drugs, cults, spices, mountains, tropical beaches, beach gigolos, 'self-esteem' necklaces, and ascended masters. Luke fully immerses himself in every environment and encounter, going far beyond reportage, while aspects of his own history - his dreams, disappointments, urges, and his inherited struggle with mental illness - begin to catch up with him. He becomes addicted to Valium, is haunted by the past, and ends up in jail. Ultimately, Luke is confronted by what is and what was, and his own footprint upon it all.
Tom Sawyer on acid, a 21st-century On the Road, a Holden Caulfield for punks ... an extraordinary memoir of a wild adolescence, told in a compelling, poetic voice